Reading her short story “Brownies” from the collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, author ZZ Packer explored racial segregation and prejudice among groups of adolescent girls in suburban Atlanta. Ms. Packer was the Bingham Visiting Writer. She grew up in Atlanta and Louisville, Kentucky, and graduated from Yale University. She earned her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa; she has held fellowships at Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. The critically lauded Drinking Coffee Elsewhere was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and a New York Times Notable Book.
“The stars sprinkled the sky like spilled salt. They seemed fastened to the darkness, high up and holy, their places fixed and definite as we stirred beneath them. Some, like me, were quiet because we were afraid of the dark; others were talking like crazy for the same reason.” (from “Brownies”)